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Audience Effects Upon Performance

A review of the audience effects on performance literature by Bell and Yee (1989) indicated that consistent with social facilitation theory it is generally believed that an audience enhances the performance of a well-learned task whereas performance is impaired for a poorly learned task. Bell and Yee (1989) examined karate students on a kicking drill. The subjects performed a roundhouse kick without setting the foot down as many times as possible in fifteen seconds with and without an audience. As expected, results indicated that skilled subjects generally kicked more accurately and with greater frequency. An audience impaired the performance of the unskilled subjects but did not affect performance by the skilled subjects. It may not have been possible for the audience to enhance the performance of the skilled subjects due to a ceiling effect given that they were already performing at a high level.

To determine the effects of other participants on performance, Layton and Moran (1999) karate black belts while they performed a kata as a group. They found that even though the participants had refined the kata over years of practice with their own timing, the timing became more consistent when the kata was performed as a group.

Training Perceptual Skill

A review of perceptual abilities in athletes by Williams and Grant (1999) indicates that elite athletes do not have superior visual ability and that training vision does not improve sports performance. However, skilled athletes have better perceptual skills and are more capable of selectively attending to, recognizing, analyzing, and interpreting incoming visual information; they can recognize and recall playing patterns more quickly and accurately; they are better at anticipating their opponent’s behaviors through efficient visual search strategies; and they are more accurate in their expectations of their opponent’s reactions. Williams and Grant (1999) indicate that perceptual abilities can be trained by using simulation such as watching videos from the competitor’s perspective, stopping the video prior to critical interactions, and having the viewer predict the reaction or have the viewer react physically based on the prediction.

Anxiety and Performance

Anxiety can affect sports performance positively or negatively. Terry and Slade’s (1995) review of anxiety in the sports literature indicated that an increase in irrational thoughts related to anxiety will decrease performance and that an optimal level of anxiety improves performance whereas too much anxiety will decrease performance. Each athlete needs to find their prime intensity level that is most optimal to performance. Research has found that not only can the level of anxiety predict the outcome of competition, but that martial arts training appears to decrease overall anxiety.

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